Theme 1 – Engaging the cultural interface created by Indigenous educators and Indigenous communities 

Embedding Indigenous Knowledge & Perspectives

The history wars in Australia have confirmed that the identity of Australians have yet to be fully explained in terms of its cultural and social geography and politics. With the onset of globalisation research into innovation how to reform curriculum to become internationalised or made more culturally inclusive are deeply related to how universities and schools see themselves as ‘Australian’ sites of cosmopolitan or multicultural knowledge. These Australian sites are also constructions of an ambivalent whiteness and nationality that remain largely un- interrogated. Indeed they are largely imagined communities of learning that rely of constructions of whiteness and knowledge.

Indigenous Australia access and participation into university teaching and research is relatively new. Indigenous knowledge and perspectives is slowly beginning to shed move away from those older versions of Aboriginal studies that positioned anthropology and other social sciences at the forefront on the knowledge frontier relating to Indigenous people and issues.  

The Othering of Aboriginal people continues but now Indigenous academics and thinkers beginning to question the relativity of not just the old disciplines but also the new comers who are positioning “Australian identity” inside curriculum teachings as incontestable, benign racially and ethically restorative of what it means to be ‘Australian. The allocation of intellectual space to Aboriginal people in these narratives continues to define their human objects as 'traditional Aborigines' as though no change had occurred amongst Aboriginal communities.

The embedding of IK and perspectives is as much an act of dissent against hegemonic constructions of white Australianness as it is a genuine commitment to educating both white and Indigenous peoples about their joint history and cultures. It is also an opportunity to combine traditional knowledge with western-based science that allows for some measurement of the limits of knowing and the epistemology of those who profess to know ‘aborigines’.

In a rare reflective approach in 1968, the Anthropologist W. E. Stannner once proclaimed that the "Cult of disremembering" or "The Great Australian Silence" informed the knowledge and understanding of white Australians of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, history and issues. While some movement toward reforming this silence has occurred the responsibility of reminding and remembering and reforming through the process of embedding IK and perspectives in teaching and research continues to be silenced and left on the  margins.
In summary, the purpose of embedding is to encourage discussion within the academic community about the way we think about and study Indigenous issues in universities as these discourses often reveal our underlying assumptions about teaching, learning and research and how this bedrock of information, ideas and approaches can impede higher learning. While the historical Mabo decision debunked the doctrine of terra nullius in legal thought and practice, terra nullius as a social and political consciousness, continues to inform how Indigenous people and knowledge are constructed, reproduced, as appendages to western knowledge and the privileges enjoyed by white knowledge.
Why is this so?

Glossary and links:

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Email: indigenousknowledge@qut.edu.au